‘Probably all for the best. Who can tell? Still, losing that manuscript takes some laughing off. I’ll have to think a lot about that.’
Bagshaw still hung about.
‘Are you absolutely cleaned out, Trappy?’
‘Me? Cleaned out? Good heavens, no. Thanks a lot all the same, but a cheque arrived this morning, quite a decent one, from a film paper I’d done a piece for.’
Whether or not that were true, it was a good exit line; Trapnel at his best. Bagshaw and I said goodnight. We passed again along the banks of the Canal, its waters still overspread with the pages of Profiles in String. The smell of the flat had again reminded me of Maclintick’s.
‘Will he really be all right?’
‘I don’t know about being all right exactly,’ said Bagshaw. ‘It’s hard to be all right when you’ve not only lost your girl, but she’s simultaneously destroyed your life work. I don’t know what I’d feel like in the same position. I’ve sometimes thought of writing another novel—a political one. Somehow there never seems time. I expect Trappy’ll pull through. Most of us do.’
‘I mean he won’t do himself in?’
‘Trappy?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, no. I’d be very surprised.’
‘People do.’
‘I know they do. There was a chap in Spain when I was there. An anarcho-syndicalist. He’d talk about Proudhon by the hour together. He shot himself in a hotel room. I don’t think Trappy will ever take that step. He’s too interested in his own myth. Not the type anyway. He’d have done it before now, if he were going to.’
‘He says something about suicide in the Camel.’
‘The Camel’s not an exact description of Trappy’s own life. He is always complaining people take it as that. You must have heard him. There are incidents, but the novel’s not a blow-by-blow account of his early career.’
‘I’ve heard X say that readers can never believe a novelist invents anything. He was at least in Egypt?’
‘Do you mean to say he’s never told you what he was doing there?’
‘I’d always imagined his father was in the Consular, or something of the sort—possibly secret service connexions. X is always very keen on spying, says there’s a resemblance between what a spy does and what a novelist does, the point being you don’t suddenly steal an indispensable secret that gives complete mastery of the situation, but accumulate a lot of relatively humdrum facts, which when collated provide the picture.’
Bagshaw was not greatly interested in how novelists went to work, but was greatly astonished at this ignorance of Trapnel’s life when young.
‘A spy? Trapnel père wasn’t a spy. He was a jockey. Rode for the most part in Egypt. That’s why he knew the country. Did rather well in his profession, and saved up a bit. Married a girl from one of those English families who’ve lived for three or four generations in the Levant.’
‘But all this is good stuff. Why doesn’t X write about it?’
‘He did talk of an article for the mag. Then he thought he’d keep it for a book. Trappy has mixed feelings. Of course he got through whatever money there was, as soon as he laid hands on it. He’s not exactly ashamed. Rather proud in a way. All the same, it doesn’t quite fit in with his own picture of himself. Hints about the secret service seem more exciting. The other was just ordinary home life, therefore rather dull.’
By this time Bagshaw was all but sober. Our paths lay in different directions. We parted. I made my way home. A great deal seemed to have happened in a comparatively short time. It was still before midnight. A clock struck twelve while I put the key in the door. As if from a neighbouring minaret, a cat muezzin began to call other cats to prayer. The aberrations of love were incalculable. Burton, I remembered, supposed the passion to extend even into the botanic world:
‘In vegetal creatures what sovereignty Love hath by many pregnant proofs and familiar example may be proved, especially of palm trees, which are both he and she, and express not a sympathy but a love-passion, as by many observations have been confirmed. Constantine gives an instance out of Florentius his Georgicks, of a Palm-tree that loved most fervently, and would not be comforted until such time her love applied himself unto her; you might see the two trees bend, and of their own accords stretch out their bows to embrace and kiss each other; they will give manifest signs of mutual love. Ammianus Marcellinus reports that they marry one another, and fall in love if they grow in sight; and when the wind brings up the smell to them, they are marvellously affected. Philostratus observes as much, and Galen, they will be sick for love, ready to die and pine away …’
Now, considering these matters that autumn afternoon under the colonnade, vegetal love seemed scarcely less plausible than the human kind. The damp cobblestones in front gave the illusion of quivering where the sunlight struck their irregular convexities. Rain still fell. The Library presented itself as a preferable refuge from the wet. I was uncertain whether rules permitted casual entry. It was worth trying. At worst, if told to go away, one could remain in the porch until time to move on. It would be no worse than where I was. Abandoning the colonnade, I crossed the road to a grey domed Edwardian building. Beyond its threshold, a parabola of passage-way led into a high circular room, rising to the roof and surrounded by a gallery. The place, often a welcome oasis in the past, seemed smaller than remembered. A few boys were pottering about among the bays of books, with an absent-minded air, or furiously writing at a table, as if life itself depended on getting whatever it was finished in time. A librarian presided at his desk.
Hoping to remain unobserved, I loitered by the door. That was not to be. The librarian looked up and stared. He took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, chose another pair from several spectacle-cases in front of him, put them on his nose and stared again. After a moment of this, he beckoned me. Recognizing that I was not to be allowed to kill five or ten minutes in peace, I prepared for expulsion. No doubt there was a regulation against visitors at this hour. The thing to do would be to delay eviction as long as possible, so that a minimum of time had to be spent in the porch. The librarian’s beckonings became more urgent. He was a man older than normal for the job, more formally dressed. In fact, this was clearly an assistant master substituting for a regular librarian. Professional librarians were probably unprocurable owing to shortage of labour. I went across the room to see what he wanted. Tactics could be decided by his own comportment. This happy-go-lucky approach was cut short. Sitting at the desk was my former housemaster Le Bas. He spoke crossly.
‘Do I know you?’
Boyhood returned in a flash, the instinct to oppose Le Bas—as Bagshaw would say—dialectically. The question was unanswerable. It is reasonable for someone to ask if you know him, because such knowledge is in the hands of the questioned party. How can it be asserted with assurance whether or not the questioner knows one? Powers of telepathy would be required. It could certainly be urged that five years spent under the same roof, so to speak under Le Bas’s guidance, gave him a decided opportunity for knowing one; almost an unfair advantage, both in the superficial, also the more searching sense of the phrase. That was the primitive, atavistic reaction. More mature consideration brought to mind Le Bas’s notorious forgetfulness even in those days. There was no reason to suppose his memory had improved.
‘I was in your house—’
Obviously it would be absurd to call him ‘sir’, yet that still obtruded as the only suitable form of address. What on earth else could he be called? Just ‘Le Bas’? Certainly he belonged to a generation which continued throughout a lifetime to use that excellently masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first names smothered all subtleties of relationship. ín any case, to call Le Bas by a Christian name was unthinkable. What would it be, in effect, if so daring an apostrophe were contemplated? The initials had been L. L. Le B.—Lawrence Langton Le Bas, that was it. No one had ever been known to call him Lawrence, still less Langton. Among the other
masters, some—his old enemy Cobberton, for example—used once in a way to hail him as ‘Le B.’ There was, after all, really no necessity to call him anything. Le Bas himself grew impatient at this procrastination.
‘What’s your name?’
I told him. That made things easier at once. Direct enquiry of that sort on the part of a former preceptor was much to be preferred to Sillery’s reckless guessing. Confessed ignorance on the point—as on most points—showed a saner attitude towards life. Le Bas had learnt that, if nothing else. He was probably older than Sillery, a few years the wrong side of eighty. Like Sillery, though in a different manner, he too looked well; leathery, saurian; dry as a bone. Taking off the second pair of spectacles, he again rubbed in the old accustomed fashion the deep, painfully inflamed sockets of the eyes. Then he resumed the earlier pair, or perhaps yet a third reserve.
‘What’s your generation, Jenkins?’
This was like coming up for sentence at the Last Judgment. I tried to remember, to speak more exactly, tried to decide how best to put the answer clearly to Le Bas.
‘Fettiplace-Jones was captain of the house when I arrived … my own lot … Stringham … Templer …’
Le Bas glared, as if in frank disbelief. Whether that was because the names conveyed nothing, or my own seemed not to belong amongst them, was only to be surmised. It looked as if he were about to accuse me of being an impostor, to be turned away from the Library forthwith. I lost my head, began to recite names at random as they came into my mind.
‘Simson … Fitzwith … Ghika … Brandreth … Maiden … Bischoffsheim … Whitney … Parkinson … Summers-Miller … Pyefinch … the Calthorpes … Widmerpool …’
At the last name Le Bas suddenly came to life.
‘Widmerpool?’
‘Widmerpool was a year or so senior to me.’
Le Bas seemed to forget that all we were trying to do was approximately to place my own age-group in his mind. He took one of several pens lying on the desk, examined it, chose another one, examined that, then wrote ‘Widmerpool’ on the blotting paper in front of him, drawing a circle round the name. This was an unexpected reaction. It seemed to have nothing whatever to do with myself. Le Bas now sunk into a state of near oblivion. Could it be a form of exorcism against pupils of his whom he had never much liked? Then he offered an explanation.
‘Widmerpool’s down here today. I met him in the street. We had a talk. He told me about a cause he’s interested in. That’s why I made a note. I shall have to try and remember what he said. He’s an MP now. What happened to the others?’
It was like answering enquiries after a match—‘Fettiplace-Jones was out first ball, sir’ … ‘Parkinson kicked a goal, sir’ … ‘Whitney got his colours, sir’. I tried to recollect some piece of information to be deemed of interest to Le Bas about the sort of boys of whom he could approve, but the only facts that came to mind were neither about these, nor cheerful.
‘Stringham died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.’
‘Yes, yes—so I heard.’
That awareness was unexpected.
‘Templer was killed on a secret operation.’
‘In the Balkans. Somebody told me. Very sad.’
Once more the cognition was unforeseen. Its acknowledgment was followed by Le Bas taking up the pen again. Underneath Widmerpool’s name he wrote ‘Balkans’, drew another circle round the word, which he attached to the first circle by a line. It looked more than ever like some form of incantation.
‘Now I remember what it was Widmerpool consulted me about. Some society he has organized to encourage good relations with one of the Balkan countries. Now which one? Simson was drowned. Torpedoed in a troopship.’
He mentioned Simson as another relevant fact, not at all as if he did not wish to be outdone in consciousness of widespread human dissolution in time of war.
‘What are you doing yourself, Jenkins?’
‘I’m writing a book on Burton—the Anatomy of Melancholy man.’
Le Bas took two or three seconds to absorb that statement, the aspects, good and bad, implied by such an activity. He had probably heard of Burton. He might easily know more about him than did Sillery. Dons were not necessarily better informed than schoolmasters. When at last he spoke, it was clear Le Bas did know about Burton. He was not wholly approving.
‘Rather a morbid subject.’
He had used just that epithet when he found me, as a schoolboy, reading St John Clarke’s Fields of Amaranth. He may have thought reading or writing books equally morbid, whatever the content. To be fair to Le Bas as a critic, Fields of Amaranth—if you were prepared to use the term critically at all—might reasonably be so described. I now agreed, even if on different grounds. The admission had to be made. Time had been on Le Bas’s side.
We were interrupted at this moment by a very small boy, who had come to stand close by where we were talking. It would be fairer to say we were inhibited by his presence, because no direct interruption took place. Dispelling about him an aura of immense, if not wholly convincing goodness, his intention was evidently to accost Le Bas in due course, at the same time ostentatiously to avoid any implication that he could be so lacking in good manners as to break into a conversation or attempt to overhear it. Le Bas, possibly not unwilling to seek dispensation from further talk about the past, distant or immediate, with all its un-comfortably realistic—Trapnel might prefer, naturalistic—undercurrents, turned in the boy’s direction.
‘What do you want?’
‘I can wait, sir.’
This assurance that his own hopes were wholly unimportant, that Youth was prepared to waste valuable time indefinitely while Age span out its senile conference, did not in the least impress Le Bas, too conversant with the ways of boys not to be for ever on his guard.
‘Can’t you find some book?’
‘Sir—the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.’
‘Brewer’s?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘You’ve looked on the proper shelf?’
‘Of course, sir.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Akworth, sir.
Le Bas rose.
‘It will be the worse for you, Akworth, if Brewer turns out to be on the proper shelf.’
I explained to Le Bas why I had come; that it was time to move on to my appointment.
‘Good, good. Excellent. I’m glad we had a—well, a chat. Most fortunate you reminded me of that society of Widmerpool’s. I don’t know why he should think I am specially interested in the Balkans—though now I come to think of it, Templer’s … makes a kind of link. You know, Jenkins, among my former pupils, I should never have guessed Widmerpool would have entered the House of Commons. Fettiplace-Jones, yes—he was another matter.’
Le Bas paused. He had immediately regretted this implied criticism of Widmerpool’s abilities.
‘Of course, they need all sorts and conditions of men to govern the country. Especially these days. Sad about those fellows who were killed. I sometimes think of the number of pupils of mine who lost their lives. Two wars. It adds up. Come along, Akworth.’
The boy smiled, conveying at once apology for disruption of our talk, and his own certainty that its termination must have come as a relief to me. As he hurried off towards one of the shelves, beside which he had piled up a heap of books, he gave the impression that quite a complicated intellectual programme for ragging Le Bas had been planned. Le Bas himself sighed.
‘Goodbye, Jenkins. I hope the school will have acquired a regular librarian by your next visit.’
It was still wet outside, but, by the time my appointment was at an end, the rain had stopped. A damp earthy smell filled the air. The weather was appreciably colder. In spite of that a man in a mackintosh was sitting on the low wall that ran the length of the further side of the street in front of the archway and chapel. It was Widmerpool. He looked in great dejection. I had not seen him since the night at Trapnel’s flat, when he had, so to
speak, expressed his confidence in Pamela’s return. Now that had come about. He had prophesied truly. Isobel, about a month before, soon after the destruction of Profiles in String, had pointed out a paragraph in a newspaper listing guests at some public function. The names ‘Mr Kenneth Widmerpool MP and Mrs Widmerpool’ were included. It was just as predicted. In the Governmental reshuffle at the beginning of October Widmerpool had received minor office. In spite of these two matters, both showing himself undoubtedly in the ascendant, he sat lonely and cheerless. I should have been tempted to try and slip by unnoticed, but he saw me, and shouted something. I crossed the road.
‘Congratulations on your new parliamentary job.’
‘Thanks, thanks. What are you doing down here?’
I told him, adding that I had been talking with Le Bas.
‘I ran into him too. I took the opportunity of giving him some account of my Balkan visit. Whatever one may think of Le Bas’s capabilities as a teacher, he is supposedly in charge of the young, and should therefore be put in possession of the correct facts.’
‘How did your trip go?’
‘We hear a lot about what is called an “Iron Curtain”. Where is this “Iron Curtain”, I ask myself? I found no sign. That was what I told Le Bas. You might think him a person to hold reactionary views, but I found that was not at all the case, now that the idea of world revolution has been dropped. By the way, how are you employed since Fission has closed down?’
I mentioned various concerns that involved me. Widmerpool showed no embarrassment in mentioning the magazine. He even asked if it were true that Bagshaw had secured a job in television. However, when I enquired why, on such a damp and increasingly cold evening, he should be sitting on the wall, apparently just watching the world go by, he shifted uneasily, stiffening at the question.
‘Pam and I came down for the day.’